We estimate the impact of direct payments under the 2002 Farm Act on the credit terms of farm operators, specifically the interest rate on short-term operating loans. In the analysis, we control for farm financial characteristic, farm operator characteristics, and other factors. Using data from...

The use of agricultural decoupled support has increased as World Trade Organization (WTO) member nations implement less trade distortive policies. However, the true production effects of these policies are still unclear. We show how the exclusion restrictions of U.S. direct payments, namely, the...

Global food commodity price inflation beginning in 2006 and continuing through mid-2008 became a priority concern for global consumers, producers and policy-makers alike. In response, many governments across the world implemented policies targeting high food commodity prices in their domestic...

This study provides a different perspective in revisiting the racial and gender discrimination issue regarding FSA loans. The Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method, commonly used in wage discrimination analysis, is employed to determine whether there exist unwarranted differences between the loan...

This paper studies the regional distribution of the benefits from trade in Mexico after NAFTA. Specifically, we ask whether or not NAFTA has increased the concentration of economic activity in Mexico. Unlike previous work which uses state-level data, we identify the effect of NAFTA on economic...

We explore in this paper the consequences of status seeking preferences among agents contracting with a private principal in the context of production. We examine in particular the case of envy and we show that in general envy entails augmented distortions due to asymmetric information in...

This paper assesses the roles of various factors influencing the volatility of crude oil prices and the possible linkage between this volatility and agricultural commodity markets. Stochastic volatility models are applied to weekly crude oil, corn and wheat futures prices from November 1998 to...

This study relates habit persistence and trust to recurring food safety incidents in the context of a series of three BSE incidents in Canada. We examined the dynamics of monthly beef expenditure shares of a sample of Canadian households for monthly time periods during year 2002 through 2005...

A model of commodity futures contract basis was developed based on Working’s theory of the price of storage. An error-correction model was estimated for the basis for the InterContinental Exchange (ICE) #2 cotton contract maturing in December during 2000-08. The model was also extended to...

Crop producers have numerous marketing and risk management tools available. Research relating producers’ risk attitudes to their use of these tools has produced mixed results, and most studies focus on individual tools to the neglect of complementarities among them. Hence, little is known...